So it is not by accident, I think, that we have put the stars in the field of our flag. They are cosmic symbols gathered from the immeasurable universe, not from pieces of earth and stretches of water, which together make up what we are accustomed to call, whatever our origin, “our native land”—a people of clearly defined national personality, but of planetary consciousness and of interdependent destinies.
But in this land of Copernicus, where “the capital event of modern thought” occurred, I found that only two million eight hundred thousand children of school age out of four million six hundred thousand had any schooling whatever. It was hoped by the minister of education that by 1928, if only the fear of a new partition of Poland could be removed and credits found, they might make some most elemental provision for the rest—and this only because so many of the young men of Poland had perished in the World War that the coming generation would be a smaller one. I could present statistics of like import for other European states. They would all support my thesis, that since we have had a World War for freedom, we should have a world plan for giving the children who have suffered in this divided earth (the millions of “Pelegs”) an elemental chance to enjoy that freeing of the soul which is, with the unity of mankind, the ideal end of the state.
A plan which I proposed some time ago, and which I have now taken courage of the support in modified form by men of large financial and organizing experience to defend, is that the Allied debts be made a permanent trust fund, to be administered for the education of the children of all peoples, so far as they can be so applied. The proposal has been characterized as “good business,” not to demand the full payment of these debts with interest of that which we loaned, but spent largely at home, and after we entered the war. The fundamental thought on which I should base the proposal is that the world, as a whole, owes something to the children who have no fair chance in it because of what those upon whom they are naturally dependent have sacrificed for the good of the world as a whole.
My original proposal was that the principal should be cancelled as it was so spent, but Judge Lovett, president of the Union Pacific, has proposed merely the application of the interest at a moderate rate annually to this purpose if and when it can be paid, though he has given it a broader scope—putting education last—the care of widows, orphans, and crippled first—but ultimately it should all be devoted to education.
A ten-billion dollar war debt converted (as a thanksgiving offering for deliverance from something worse than the world knows even at its worst to-day) into a perpetual trust fund for the children of the world, especially for those who have come “trailing clouds of glory” into a part of the world where they haven’t a chance to come into the heritage of their generation.
Five hundred million dollars a year (an incredible number of Austrian crowns, Russian roubles, or Polish marks (if indeed the interest could be paid at the rate of five per cent)) which would give an elementary-school training to ten million children each year—as many children as are born each year into the world. And this interest could be paid if armaments were unnecessary.
Ten million children a year taught the best that has been “delivered unto or invented by mankind” (as listed in the world curriculum) and led in their tuition toward the conscious unity of the race—planetary consciousness!
Has a more stirring opportunity ever been offered to any people than is ours in the refunding of the great war debt, in such a way as to make it a blessing to the next generation instead of a crushing burden to the tax-paying generation that now goes bent with its burdens across Europe? If we were to demand our pound of flesh we should deserve the future fate of those in the “Inferno” who went eternally about weighed with cloaks of lead that were covered by a veneer of gold.
Some of the principal might be used to buy books in which these millions of children might enter into the common possession of the race (perhaps in a common language), free of scorn of other nations, and so never know the hatreds which estranged their fathers; and some might be spent for the syndicated material of which Mr. Wells speaks—the knowledges of those things which would help them to find their particular place in the cosmos.
Again, a part of the principal might be spent (and cancelled as a debt when so spent) in building schoolhouses where none can otherwise be built for a generation or two. These would be modern Enochian pillars—for what is a schoolhouse, after all, essentially but the very thing that Enoch caused to be erected—at any rate, when the teacher is in the schoolhouse furnished with the knowledge of the race mind?